Skin Deep Steam Charts & Stats

It's Die Hard in space with cats. The cats wear adorable costumes, often with little hats. This may be the perfect game.

This is a fantastic immersive sim with a ton of personality. The level design is superb for an indie title. Highly recommend this one.

I really wish people would stop calling this immersive or sandbox, it's neither. If there's any one main problem with this game, it's that everything is painfully contrived, exactly the opposite of what I'd call sandbox or immersive. It's like a poor man's Hitman, with tiny levels and lacking the creative tools, interesting mechanics within the level designs, dynamic behavior, and logical coherence to make real creative problem solving possible. The levels are actually surprisingly linear with very few different ways to get through things. If almost feels like a game that time traveled here from the 90s, people amazed that you can sneak behind the guard and take him out or crawl through vents to get around him, but you're still looking at two preprogrammed solutions that you pick from that have no element of challenge, thought, or creativity required, you just pick one and do it, in contrast to a modern sandbox game that would give you enough tools and enough nuance to the levels that you could think of solutions that didn't even occur to the devs. The doors are locked down by a series of keycards and access to the vents, windows, and airlocks are often locked behind keypads you have to find, so the number of ways you can get through a level is very limited. The limited number of ways you can take out a guard and the unchanging predictability of their movement means guards are essentially just another keycard door that you can open when you are handed the predefined way you are supposed to take them out. No One Lives Forever, a game from 2000, had better enemy behavior, player tools, and nuances to how the mechanics worked to give you a more sandbox experience than this does.

Steam really needs a middle ground for recommendations. Its an alright game. Imagine hitman with less depth and a smaller sandbox with a focus on being goofy. Levels are short and forgiving. Alerts are mostly inconsequential. Guards have a very difficult time hearing things not directly next to them

Genuinely so fun finding creative ways to dispatch enemies without using the most straightforward choice, and the reward for doing so is FUN. Finding the notes between characters and seeing how the world (universe technically) works is dopamine to brain and crave MORE. I would love a more challenging level though, or at least a nerf to a certain combo that just always kills no matter what. Which is the classic explosive gas and an ignition, I tried not to use it much but that's just a nitpick on my end to really engaging game with unique mechanics and levels. (Side note: I absolutely love the health mechanics, and the writing. My kind of vibe !!!)

It's decent and I enjoy having short levels. Story is also fun. But the gameplay loop isn't really satisfying and often feels repetitive. Yeah, they throw a bunch of mechanics but most feel almost meaningless. Just finished the game and gotta say, the last level was a real chore. Having only one saving point in the entire ship doesn't make the game deep or fun. It makes it annoying for anyone who has other things to do and play games on their spare time.

A fantastic game that basically lets you play out Die Hard in a bunch of short, wacky, puzzle-like scenarios. There's a joy in lurking in the shadows formulating a plan, springing into action, that plan going wrong, then frantically trying to make the best of it. The humor and creativity of Blendo is on full display. Not only in the writing, but in the level design and game mechanics too. You want to keep playing just to see what it will throw at you next.

An immersive sim that encourages you to do all the things that actually make immersive sims interesting instead of just shooting everything. In part because all the non-shooting interactions are so damn funny.

Skin Deep is a funny parody on stealth games but at the same time is a great stealth game by itself. You play as Nina Pasadena, a so called "Insurance Commando". Your job is to make sure that your clients, the crew of various space ships, are rescued in case of danger. The danger in this case is a group of space pirates called the "Numb Bunch" who are targeting specifically ships you are stationed on because their leader wants you dead. Each level in this game is a different space ship you have to save from the pirates. You start undetected in a cryo chamber ont he ship and you always start with no equipment because you cannot take anything with you in cryo sleep. This game is an "immersive sim" which means you have a clear goal, you have a sandbox and you can fulfill your goal how you want. You have various systems in the game that all react to your actions and allow you to be rather creative how you want to deal with every situation. Nina can carry up to five items and you can throw any item you want at anything you see. Most items you find have some functions that interact with the world. You can for example throw a deodorant which leaves a gas cloud. You can then throw a lighter to ignite the gas, creating an explosion that destroys objects in its radius and also damaging enemies. Alternatively you could throw pepper on an enemy which causes him to sneeze uncontrollably. This allows you to jump on him and then direct him into nearby objects to smash his head in. You can also throw objects to activate buttons, switches and other interactable objects in the environment. Enemies cannot be killed in this game, they have a special technology that "ejects" their head from their body and then floats to a nearby respawn point to create a new body. You can prevent this by collecting and carrying the head with you but that would fill up one of your inventory slots. These heads are also still able to make noise which can attract other enemies to your position. In order to remove them permanentely from the ship you have to throw them out into space one way or another. This can be done by flushing them down a toilet, using the trash chute or simply throwing them out the airlock. Getting noticed by enemies, even if only for a short amount, can trigger an alarm which alarms all pirates on the ship. During alarm, all pirates change their patrolling pattern. normally they stay inside their room but during an alarm they can and will walk into other rooms while looking for you. Additionally any security turret on the ship will activate and shoot at you and the pirates also summon combat drones that attack you by charging directly into you, dealing massive damage. You can stop these alarms by using one of the pirates walkietalkies and pretend to be one of them. As you progress through the game, you get introduced to more and more mechanics which make the game more complex. Pirates will start new security measurements like sealing vents, airlocks, windows and trash chutes in order to prevent you from hiding and escaping but you can unlock these by finding hidden codes and using them on terminals. Your goal on each ship is to rescue the crew of the ship. You can do this by using special keys which are usually in possession of some pirates. Released crew members stay with you but fortunately don't take up any inventory space liek the heads of pirates. Once you have all crew members collected you head out into space and call for an evacuation pod. This will evacuate the crew and also gives you some supplies in the form of additional firepower. After that a new wave of pirates spawn that will attack the ship and look for you. You finish the mission by either defeating all pirates or by using the pirate ship to escape which requires a special key that one of the pirates has. What makes this game so much fun is that it doesn't take itself seriously. It's clear that this is a parody on stealth games which means they can put all kinds of silly things in the game. You can throw banana peels or soap on the ground to make pirates slip, you can throw books at them until they have no HP left. Soap dispenser leave a cloud of gas behind that you can ignite and Nina herself has to sneeze if she stays too long in the dusty vents of the space ship. The crew on the space ships are for some reason all cats and these cats are all very blocky while the humans look totally normal. Each of the cats is also a typical stereotype like "this is the cook", "this one is a goth" and so on. The cats will write you mails after each mission and it is clear that each one only defines itself by their stereotype, which is some obvious cartoon humour. Another great aspect of the game is the voice acting. The voice actors did a great job here, especially the actress of Nina Pasadena. i love the raspy voice she gave the character, it fits a hardened fighter that is used to these kind of situations. There are a few downsides however. The first one is that this game uses a really old engine (id Tech 4 engine, also known as Doom 3 engine). This is a twenty year old engine, therefor you can expect some jankiness. One of the worse examples was fore me when I sabotaged the airlock so that everyone would be sucked out but it sucked me under the map instead where I was stuck. Usually it affects the enemies. Their heads can sometimes fall through walls and you have to wait until they move out of the wall. The second problem is difficutly. The game is overall not too hard but towards the last few missions you will be introduced to elite enemies. these guys are really annoying, they are immune to most attacks that worked before. They cannot be sucked out of the ship by sabotaging airlocks or windows and you cannot jump on them even when stunned. They also have mini rocket launchers instead of regular guns which are harder to dodge, do more damage and also destroy much of the environment around you. Oh, and they also have twice the HP compared to regular enemies. Because most attacks are inefficient against them, you have a really hard time to deal with them unless you have a gun on your own (which you only get AFTER rescuing the cats). There is even one mission where you ONLY have elite enemies. I wouldn't mind them if there were more ways to deal with them but their very limited range of weaknesses makes them very oppressive. Overall, this is a fun game, although short. The last few missions started to get a little bit annyoing due to the introduction of elite enemies but I liked playing through it.

Unironically one of the best games I've played in years. It's kinda like if Prey 2017 and Home Alone had a baby. Plus cats.